Radical constructivism is not about being right, but it is about making a
useful, satisfying, and fitting sense of experience. When communicated, as
with any communication, it can only be expected to "make sense" in the
context of the meanings in which it is formulated. When otherwise is the
case, then it should not be surprising that something appears confused or
illogical.
Many may wish to stop here. Feel free.
Beginning of the long verion of a response to Martin's comments:
Preliminary remarks:
1. There is a difference between trying to actually understand a view and
deciding whether or not to accept it and why. I notice that frequently our
culture is not very practiced at the former. "It" (its members, I guess I
should say) has a great propensity for trying to prove or disprove in a
discussion instead of trying to first see how an unfamiliar position could
make sense to its holders. I see this propensity as the biggest single
hurdle to understanding that exists in all walks of our society and in
education in particular.
It's much like the story Kuhn tells about wondering why someone as smart as
Aristotle seemed to be could hold the 'crazy non-sensical(?)' views he
expresses in his 'physics.' The story goes that Kuhn felt he made a major
breakthrough when he realized that Aristotle's physics probably DID make
sense in Aristotle's context. When Kuhn proceeded to try to see how
Aristotle's physics *could* make sense, he was apparently 'on his way' to
generating his significant contribution to thought about the nature of
science.
My appeal here is not for people to 'buy' radical constructivism (rc) or
agree with it in any way or to agree or 'see' that all other views have
been vanquished.. Instead what I am hoping for is for folks to eventually
see how rc *could* make sense. Whether they 'buy' or agree with it can
*only* be a matter of their own choice. Radical constructivism does not
"present itself" as *the* answer and insist that all other views are wrong.
A radical constructivist is likely, if asked, able to explain why she or he
does not agree with some particular view, but he or she is being
inconsistent with the basic idea of rc if she or he insists on proving
someone else wrong on an issue of view.
2. Not independent of this first choice is another issue which is
necessary to consider if one is truely trying to be self-consistent with
one's rc point of view. This issue is that of communication. Von G in a
number of places points out that if the tenets of rc are to be believed
then it cannot be that meaning exists "in" words, symbols, ...signs. We
associate meanings with them and these meanings we construct so as to be
consistent with our experience. We see these words, symbols, ...signs as
being aspects of culture and there being culturally agreed upon meanings
"attached" to them, but that meaning is learned by each new member of the
culture and in rc that learning is subjective construction to fit the
experiences of the person learning. The culturally agreed upon *menaings*
do not necessarily exist for the words for the new member of the culture
until that new member creates and tests the meaning against cultural
experience. As the experiences build up the what is constructed changes.
In the rc view because the meaning is not "in" the words, then meaning is
not seen as being transmitted when the word is uttered, symbol is drawn, or
the sign is "made". Hence, when different meaning sets are being used by
different people then the situation is prone to confusion and/or
misunderstanding. Radical constructivism being a rather different view
about the nature of knowing and knowledge, discussions about rc seem prone
to such confusions and mis-understandings.
My experience is that the least productive approach to such confusions and
mis-understandings is to attribute right or wrong, correct or incorrect,
logical or illogical to a view or person in the situation. It is usually
the case that two different underlying assumption sets (paradigms?) are
held by the people involved concerning the nature of knowing and knowledge
and therefore also about the meanings of the words in use.
3. Finally in these preliminary remarks, I find rc makes sense to me, not
because I set out looking for a theory of knowledge, especially one that is
different. I arrived "here" because my first interest is in teaching. My
earliest notions about teaching when I was still a student in high school
were that the object of the exercise of teaching was that somehow in the
end students have some new (for them at least) understanding. When I
started teaching I was surprised that this was not the usual or common
outcome.
Now years later I routinely experience the problem of "communicating" with
students about forces when I think of forces as "Newtonian" in nature and
the students do not, then the rc position with respect to communication
(not unique to rc for it is essentially what I understand to be the
Sapir-Whorf view of communication) fits VERY well and this is just one of
the examples from just physics teaching. When I am able to get the
students to really examine their OWN ideas and compare them publicly with
peers against the behavior of a phenomenon, frequently I get to see how,
under what conditions and apparently why they decide to change aspects of
their understanding of the world. What I "see" is fit by what I understand
the rc view to be, in ways that I find more satisfactory. If this were not
the case, then I would not find rc so useful. To be certain what other
people "see" is apparently fit by other views, according to their reports.
It is quite clear to me that by far most people do not "learn physics" when
taught in a paradigm in which the truth is "told" to them and it is
believed that words can be officially assigned meaning by someone and
everyone else can be told the meanings. Two possibilities are that this is
evidence that most people cannot "learn physics" as is the implied lesson
learned from most physics instruction or most people do not "learn physics"
when it is taught in the manner that it is. My experience now is that the
latter is more likely the case and that if teaching were consistent with
*another* view of knowledge and knowing then the results seem to be
different. The other view I have been working with this which results in
this experience is, of course, the rc view that I have been talking about.
Now for the response to Martin...
Martin Packer writes:
>WARNING! Philosophical discussion ahead! The faint of heart and those
>with better things to do should immediately delete this message.
Hear, hear!
>Dewey, in answer to my request to clarify radical reconstructivist
>ontology, you said:
>
>>>It's a bit like the analogy that both a grain of sand and an ounce of water
>>>will fit into an empty wine bottle, but a baseball will not. Taking the
>>>development of our ideas about the physical world over history as an
>>>example, we can see many examples in which we found the grain of sand (idea
>>>1), say, fits into the bottle (fits our experience) but some alternative,
>>>say a baseball (idea 2), did not, while at the same time the ounce of water
>>>(idea 30 had not yet occurred to us. Later when the 'ounce of water' idea
>>>did finally occur to someone, we try it and see that it fits also. We can
>>>only know the degree of fit if we can, *at the same time-independently*,
>>>know the idea (the grain of sand, the ounce of water, etc.) AND the thing
>>>we are trying to fit the world "out there" (the empty wine bottle).
>
>Your example seems designed to illustrate von G's notion that knowledge
>is not a copy, a representation, that can be said to "match" (or not) the
>way things are, but rather can be said to "fit." There is no unique
>correspondence of knowledge to reality, but a variety of ways of knowing
>that "fit." But fit what?
I think Ernst's point is that all we can say is that we have found *some*
things that fit or *one* thing that fits with no guarantee that there are
no other things that fit or how long we will feel that one thing continues
to fit.
So, fit what? Answer: *something* "out there"; something about which
in-itself we can say little except that in order to make sense of our
experiences we believe that something exists and that we seem to be able to
make explanations which 'fit' these experiences.
There's another analogy that Ernst has used namely that of lock and key. A
key fits or does not fit the lock, but the key is not the lock. I think
that he and I would be inclined to say that thinking of light, say, as rays
would make rays a sort of key to the lock of light within a certain range
of the phenomenon. But, just as a key is not the lock, neither is light
rays, nor is light waves, nor is light photons.
You might observe that we do not think of light as rays anymore. My
response is multi-fold: "We" used to think that light was rays and were
*sure* of it. We still teach about light rays and even ray-based methods
to do physics problems. We have no way of knowing 1) when a new
observation about the behavior of light will result in our deciding to
"abandon" the notion we have now about light as the best description and 2)
even then if history is any guide we will have no idea what other ideas
about the nature of light might also fit.
>Surely to speak of a "fit" one must still appeal to things-to-be-known
>that >exist apart from and prior to our knowing of them?
Where we may likely differ is in the phrase "things-to-be-known." That an
independent world exists, I think, is not actually a point of contention
here. What we *think we can know* about the nature, the make-up, the
entities and their nature which make it up _is_ where we differ, I think.
My understanding of the radical constructivist (rc) position is that
because all we know is:
1. sometimes we think we know *some* ideas which fit,
2. we don't even know if we know *all* the ideas which fit, and
3. we know that everytime we thought we knew *the one* thing which fits
best it
turned out *not* to fit all that well,
then it doesn't make sense to believe that 'fit' necessarily *tells us
anything about* "things-to-be-known", certainly not any particular
"things" that specifically "exist apart from and prior to our knowing of
them." Particular "things" might exist. They might not. In the rc view
the point is that 'fit' which is all we have, does not "tell" us *anything*
about things-in-particular which might exist "out there".
>The characterization I gave of constructivism to which
>you took strong exception was the following:
>
>>Both Piaget and von Glasersfeld, the two figures most often cited as the
>>sources of constructivism, link their work to Kant, whose philosophy was
>>notorously dualistic. Kant assumed an ontology of two realms, of the
>>subject and an independent world.
>
>You replied:
>
>>I don't think that one can say that von Glasersfeld really includes an
>>ontology of an independent world, at all.
Yes, because for me (and I think Ernst, too), ontology entails entities
posited or presupposed by some theory which is either implicit or explicit.
This is far more for me than believing in an independent world.
Do I think it makes sense to believe in an independent world? Yes. Should
I commit to *specific* entities "populating" that world and their nature?
My answer is no, because even in my own life I've experienced examples of
abandoning things I once thought were the case about the existence of
entities in the world and their nature.
Let me refer to my opening appeal about understanding vs proving or
disproving. As I see it there may be two levels of issue here. One is the
existence or non-existence of a "world out there" and what "populates" it.
The other is what is meant by the term "ontology". In the context of this
and the previous note, if one saw ontology as the classification,
specification, and description of things which "populate" the world, then
it would make sense that rc would say that it can make no ontological
commitments. If one thought of ontology as including the mere agreement
that a "world out there" exists, then rc would say that this is the *only*
ontological commitment it could make. I don't think that either Ernst or I
feel that rc 'rests' on a definition of ontology.
>I've been mulling over von G's writing, and here's an example. It's
>a section called "The reality of a constellation" in A Constructivist
>Approach to Teaching( in Steffe and Gale, 1995):
>
>>"Among the constellations in the northern hemisphere that were well known
>>at the beginning of Greek culture in the first millenium before Christ, one
>>is called Cassiopeia. The Cassiopeia is opposite the Big Bear or the Big
>>Dipper, on the other side of the Polar Star. It has the shape of a W or,
>>as the Greeks said, a crown. The shape has been known and recognized for
>>thousands of years, and it served the navigators of all times to find their
>>way across the seas. It has not changed and has proved as reliable, as
>>'real,' as any visual percept can be.
>>For an astronomer, the five stars that are taken to compose the W have
>>Greek letters as names, and the astronomer can tell how far these stars are
>>from those who observe them from this planet. Alpha is 45 light years
>>away, Beta 150. The distance to Gamma is 96, to Delta 43, and to Epsilon
>>520 light years. Consider this spatial arrangement for a moment. If you
>>moved 45 light years towards Cassiopeia, you would have passed Delta and
>>you would be standing on Alpha. The constellation would have fallen apart
>>during your journey. If you moved sideways from our earth, it would
>>disintegrate even more quickly. Where, then, does this image called
>>Cassiopeia exist? The only answer I can suggest is that it exists in our
>>minds. Not only because it is relative to the point from which we look,
>>but also because it is we who pick five specific stars and create a
>>connection between them we consider appropriate. This picking out and
>>connecting is part of what I call the *subjective construction* [original
>>emphasis] of our experiential world."
>
>This passage is what I would called confused. It seems at first that von G
>is making a distinction between the constellation--an "image," "in our
>minds"--and the real stars we are "picking out and connecting."
>These stars are independent of us, whereas the constellation is not.
I think that von G's point here is not a distinction between constellation
and stars. He is talking about the notion "constellation" (a associated
group of stars) and its "reality" and a situation in which challenges the
notion that such groups of stars are actually associated by anything other
than our own imaginations.
I also do not think that Ernst would make the same distinction your words
seem to imply when you say "real stars" and "These stars are independent of
us". Certainly there seems to be some aspects of our experience (note this
is apparently a shared experience among cognizing beings) which we have
come to call stars. Exactly what we think these stars are and what class
of mentally constructed object descriptions/which experiential referents
are actually included in the class we call stars has changed over history.
As you probably know at one time stars were possibly holes in the celestial
sphere through which the glory of the heavens shone. What we call planets
now were considered wandering stars by the Greeks. These notions lasted
much longer than our current ideas about stars and planets, yet were
destined to change.
It looks like you are using you notion of the "reality" of stars in von G's
example and not one consistent with his views. The certainly could be a
source of confusion.
> But
>this is surely not compatible with von G's constructivism. For where
>do the stars exist? They must be "images" too, surely. But if they too
>exist "in our minds" why don't they "distintegrate" too? And if each of
>them is an "image," then where are we going when we travel towards them?
>What are we doing when we measure our distance from them? What do we
>interact with when we point our telescopes towards them?
I think when trying to understand rc, we have to be very careful to
distinguish between our experiential world and our explanations of it.
This is what I'm trying to get at above when I get at the *notion* of
"stars." The experiences we associate with what we currently call stars
are ones that seem stable. We have a tendency to explain such things with
the notion of "objects." But, in rc there is a distinction between the
experience and the knowledge formulated to explain it.
>These questions can be answered without falling back into naive realism or
>a representational theory of knowledge, but not, I believe, in the way that
>von G tries.
Now, rc is not naive realism, but what I have said so far might be
considered a representational theory of knowledge, knowledge as a kind of
explanatory representation of experience. Here's a quote from the same
article you've quoted von G (p. 6-7):
"...The change consists of this: Give up the requirement that knowledge
represent an independent world, and admit instead that knowledge represents
something that is far more important to us, namely what we can *do* in our
*experiential world*, the successful ways of dealing with the objects we
call physical and the successful ways of thinking with abstract concepts.
"Often when I say this, there are some who protest that I am denying
reality. It is foolish to deny the existence of reality, they say--it
leads to solipsism, and solipsism is unacceptable. This is a basic
misunderstanding of constructivism, and it springs from the resistance or
refusal to change the concept of knowing. I have never denied an absolute
reality, I only claim, as the skeptics do, the we have no way of knowing
it. As a constructivist, I go one step further: I claim that we can define
the meaning of *to exist* only within the realm of our experiential world
and not ontologically. When the word *existence* is applied to the world
that is supposed to be independent of our experiencing (i.e., an
*ontological* world), it loses its meaning and cannot make any sense [to a
radical constructivist]." {Italics denoted by *...* in the original. Last
phrase added by me for the present context.}
It seems that to understand (but not necessarily agree with) this radical
constructivism that Ernst is talking about a key might be to consider this
different "concept of knowing." He is referring to a kind of existence of
explanatory knowledge which is based on experience and not on absolute
reality. Two ideas of existence based on these two sources, experience and
absolute reality, must necessarily be different ideas of existence. He is
specifically saying that the idea of existence based on absolute reality is
not a part of rc. Note also in this passage that he distinguishes an
experiential world and an *ontological* world.
>His view is precisely Kantian: the mind imposes structure on
>the raw data of experience: in von G's terms this is a "subjective
>construction," such that the "experiential world" is "in our minds."
I think that von G would say instead that the "subjective construction"
which is the "experiential world" is "in our minds."
>But what, then, do we interact with?
Apparently the "world out there."
>Kant, with the same view, tried to solve the
>problem by presuming a reality with which we interact, prior to and
>independent of our acts of knowing. Von G explcitly tries to deny this
>>independent reality but his writing continually appeals to something that
>>underlies appearance.
It appears that this "concept of knowing" issue is the point here. Note in
the quotation above that Ernst says: "I have never denied an absolute
reality, I only claim, as the skeptics do, that we have no way of knowing
it." The way that I understand it is we have NO way of KNOWING it. (God,
using just ascii characters is quite a limitation!) I believe that Ernst
is saying that we interact with something we do not and cannot know for
what it "IS." He is not denying the independent reality of a "world out
there." His view is of knowledge is that knowledge does not tell us what
that "world out there IS."
>These are the
>conundra that Kantian dualism leaves one in: one wants to distinguish
>appearance from reality, and yet one can't say anything about that reality.
Yes, but why is this necessarily a conundrum? One *can* say something about:
"what we can *do* in our *experiential world*, the successful ways of
dealing with the objects we call physical and the successful ways of
thinking with abstract concepts." to quote Ernst. It certainly appears to
me to be a workable, useable description of human knowledge and its history.
>But if one instead denies reality,...
What reality are you referring to here? Is it an rc version or another?
>...what distinguishes knowledge from fantasy?
Indeed. Hasn't this been a struggle over all human history? Don't we see
the notion of a flat earth as a fantasy? Isn't the notion of everything
revolving around the earth now seen as fantasy? Weren't people in the past
convinced of these notions, not as fantasy but as "truth"? What of what we
are convinced of now will be seen as fantasy in the future?
>Again, the assumed ontology is one of mind and (albeit unknowable)
>independent reality.
But, this on the surface at least appears not to be the sense in which
ontology is being used by Ernst.
>I agree with von G in so far as he is saying that what is "real" is real
>*to us,* but locating the "radical construction" of the real in the
>individual mind is not the solution.
But Ernst is not talking about construction of the real in the normal
sense. He says right after the quotation above:
"Of course, even as constructivists, we can use the word *reality*, but it
is defined differently. It is made up of the network of things and
relationships that we rely on in our living, and on which, we believe,
others rely on, too."
This sounds like the social and the cultural is unavoidably included here
to me. If we are to believe he is trying to make a coherent sense then
these "things and relationships" are something in the specific context of
what he is talking about when he describes knowing "namely what we can *do*
in our *experiential world*, the successful ways of dealing with the
objects we call physical and the successful ways of thinking with abstract
concepts."
>It confuses knowing with being, for a
>start, because what people have in their minds is knowledge, not things.
>Conversely, what people have in their hands is not knowledge, but things.
It appears to me here that the phrase "It confuses knowing with being" does
not use the term "knowing" in a way compatible with what Ernst says in the
quotation above or the many others I have read. If anything, using the
meanings of "knowing" and "being" that I believe are most compatible with
rc, "knowing" and "being" are the *last* things that would be confused, if
by "confused" one means either switched for each other or equated in some
way. One has to keep in mind that in rc, of the 'things in our hands,' we
have only knowledge which we have constructed. So, I don't see that what
Ernst is talking about equates knowing with being in an rc sense.
...and it is unclear to me, from an rc view, of course, why subjective
construction in *individual minds* (note: this does not read "the
individual mind") is not a workable explanation. I watch the interplay
between students with different subjective constructions function every
semester. Again, I am not trying to say an alternative this is not also an
explanation with which someone might want to work. I'm just trying to help
the reader see how an rc view could work.
>It is such problems that motivated efforts to articulate a non-dualistic
>ontology--and these are one source, at least, of sociocultural psychology.
>Such an approach acknowledges that
>we construct not just knowledge but also things, and that this construction
>is not an individual mental one, but a practical social one. Things become
>real not in our minds, but in our practices. This is not to deny mental
>activity, but mind and its activity are themselves the products of social
>practices. The world is not private and mental, it is public and
>practical.
It seems like you are saying that the sociocultural psychological approach
solves the dualism problem by putting everything in the social-cultural
dimension while not denying mental activity; in a sense defining everything
else as non-entity or non-important. Isn't there still just as much
dualism in that solution as there is with rc saying that yes the "world out
there exists" but we can't *know* anything about what it IS? It also seems
that this sociocultural psychological (scp) position you describe is not
addressing the same thing as rc. The scp
I think that Ernst might agree with some of what you describe, but in terms
of meanings compatible with the rc view he is describing. I think he might
agree that the in the rc view "things" are items in an "ontology" of
constructed knowledge. (I put "" around "ontology" here because it seems
Ernst does not use the term, ontology, to refer to the subjective
constructions from our experience.) In the same article from which you and
I have been quoting Ernst has sections titled "The Importance of Social
Interaction" and "The Reality of Conventional Rules". One might be tempted
to point out that there is much more to culture and Ernst would be the
first one to agree.
"Things become real not in our minds, but in our practices." Within the
meaning of real or reality given in the quote I give above, isn't this what
Ernst is saying when he says: "...knowledge represents something that is
far more important to us, namely what we can *do* in our *experiential
world*, the successful ways of dealing with the objects we call physical
and the successful ways of thinking with abstract concepts."?
In the sense that Paul Cobb talks about (in the chapter in Contexts for
Learning, for example) I think that von G would suggest that it makes more
sense to see mind and activity on the one hand and social practices on the
other in a dialectic relationship with each other. Hence, "mind and
activity" are not "products of social practice", but that "mind and
activity" and "social practice" are "products" of each other. I think
Ernst might hold that the meaning we make or construct is the private and
mental response to public and practical experience and needs.